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IBM Businesses

Virginia Rometty Selected As Next CEO of IBM 131

Posted by Soulskill from the driving-big-blue dept.
itwbennett writes "IBM will start the new year with a new CEO. Virginia (Ginni) Rometty, who built up IBM Global Services, will be the company's first female CEO."
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Virginia Rometty Selected As Next CEO of IBM More

Virginia Rometty Selected As Next CEO of IBM

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  • Female? (Score:4, Funny)

    by atari2600a ( 1892574 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2011 @07:03PM (#37838446)
    I thought IBM purely consisted of gay successful men. That's how their songs put it...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by blair1q ( 305137 )

      Common misconception. Back in the 50s, when those songs were written, everyone was gay. The world has changed a lot since then.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Who says that she wasn't... *cough*... just a little bit more successful than the rest of the gay men? ^^

  • Never heard of her until 10 minutes ago, but sounds like she should be able to keep IBM afloat - unlike HP

    • You only needed to know that she led the Sales division. IBM always gave a lot of credit and power to its sales force, and its CEOs are usually those who held her position.

      • Her college degree was tech, and she appears competent. What concerns me is she said "I deserve it", which is a very bad attitude.

  • Schizophrenic America (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RobinEggs ( 1453925 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2011 @07:17PM (#37838608)
    Here we are celebrating another newly minted female CEO of a powerhouse corporation. Meanwhile, with the other side of our mouths, we're constantly bemoaning the fact that most Fortune 500 CEOs are greedy parasites, not to mention the large minority who seem to be sociopaths (and not in a figurative way, either).

    It reminds me of that small number of feminists who seem to view sexual liberation not in terms of respect, mature dialogue, and winning their freedom from chauvanism, but merely as the freedom for women to be as sex-crazed and/or misandropic as some men are chauvanist and misogynistic.

    Perhaps we shouldn't be so proud of women breaking into a job dominated by assholes? Are we assuming that women, unlike the men with whom they successfully competed to get these jobs, will suddenly be nice people when they're the ones on top? I try to understand when people say the pendulum is still swinging, that women need to make further explicit gains before we can just call it all equal, but I still wish we could reserve admiration and outright celebration for simply people who do good things, rather than continuing to break it out into Men and Women.

    At some point the lauding of the "first female" this and the constant keeping of score has to stop if you want to say you achieved real equality.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Your presumption is that it's about equality. It's not.
      It's about women's rights and empowerment.
      You get rewarded for having a vagina today, and punished for having a penis.

      • You get rewarded for having a vagina today, and punished for having a penis.

        And then you whine about it. Endlessly. How manly of you.

      • She was rewarded because she was the director of the Sales division. It's really common for IBM to grant the CEO badge to whoever led Sales. If an extraterrestrial entity had been in her position, it would have been elected instead.

    • Re:Schizophrenic America (Score:4, Insightful)

      by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2011 @07:48PM (#37838914) Journal

      I think we're supposed to assume that since she's female, she's less likely to be a greedy parasite.

      Unfortunately, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina have forever destroyed that stereotype.

      It remains to be seen if Ms. Rometty is human as well as success-oriented.

    • Freedom includes the freedom to be an asshole. One of the standard stereotypes about women is that they're less capable than men in jobs which require making ruthless decisions. Now, personally, I think we'd all be better off if CEOs of both sexes were a lot less ruthless generally -- that is, if they felt some empathy toward and personal responsibility for the welfare of their employees -- but since that's not the world we live in, women have to show that they can perform in these jobs as well as the ste

    • It reminds me of that small number of feminists who seem to view sexual liberation not in terms of respect, mature dialogue, and winning their freedom from chauvanism, but merely as the freedom for women to be as sex-crazed and/or misandropic as some men are chauvanist and misogynistic.

      Considering what women have had to deal with throughout history, and still continue to deal with today - this is a hell of a good start, if nothing else.

      The respect and dialogue can come later. In my experience it won't come

  • Promoting from Within (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    She was once the 99%. Hired as an engineer. Climbed the ranks.

    Why didn't the IBM board offer gagillions to some flash CEO from somewhere else?

    Good luck Ginni.

  • The world ends tomorrow. Details at 11.

  • ...of former female CEOs, who have all been mediocre (think Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman). I wish her all the best.

  • The new CEO is the old head of their services division and oversaw the PriceWaterhouseCoopers takeover in 2002. I think this means that in the coming years, IBM will make a lot more money with a lot less engineers, thanks to their lucrative services business.

    If you ask me, it's just a matter of time before the slow death of the server group accelerates into high-speed PC/consumer business style death.

    Hold that stock.

  • Congratulations (Score:4)

    by msobkow ( 48369 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2011 @07:48PM (#37838908) Homepage Journal

    Congratulations to Virginia Rometty on her promotion. The glass ceiling isn't shattered yet, but it's cracking.

    Is she going to be getting a 25:1 Canadian or Euro style pay package, or is she taking the hundreds to one ratio of many US executives that people are complaining about? The article doesn't say.

    IBM is a great place to work or contract. I really enjoyed the time I spent working on a project with them.

  • Next stop: head up the USPTO. (Score:3)

    by jbn-o ( 555068 ) <mail@digitalcitizen.info> on Tuesday October 25, 2011 @08:33PM (#37839376) Homepage

    And if David Kappos' recent move is any indication, her next big step is clear: head up the US Patent and Trademark Office when Kappos leaves. I'm guessing that IBM would love this move because there she can better serve IBM's interests against those of the public. Kappos, current USPTO Director, was former IBM vice president and assistant general counsel of "intellectual property [gnu.org]" law. IBM holds the most patents. First-to-file undoubtedly helps large firms like IBM because large firms hire lots of lawyers to file all sorts of patent applications. The more patents IBM holds, the more IBM can cross-license their way out of any threatened patent litigation [progfree.org] by threatening countersuit and then negotiating a patent license.

    • Didn't we sort the first-to-file vs. first-to-invent issue in a past story? I thought first-to-file was unambiguous and not open to legal challenge. A small time inventor who files first is safe no matter how large a lab/legal department a mega corporation has (assuming, of course, that the invention is valid). Where in the first-to-invent system, a large corporation with a large R&D department would be able to pull up various old/abandoned/half-baked proposals and claim to have invented it first. Of co

  • I had high hopes that she would ... (Score:3)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2011 @08:43PM (#37839458) Journal
    be the next Gerstner. I just realized that she was fundamental to the offshoring of the company and the selling of the divisions as much as Palmisano. I predict that IBM is the next ATT and watson will be the next Bell Labs. Gutted for short sales in the market place.
  • They said their priorities were their customers, their employees and their shareholders. In that order.

    Since that time I've seen them outsourcing their employees jobs, and I don't know who are their customers anymore. I've seen them lose some remarkable talent to "early retirement" programs. I've seen them sell division after division that were core components of their culture and their business. At one time I felt like even when I wasn't working for them, I knew who IBM was and what they were trying to a

    • At one time I felt like even when I wasn't working for them, I knew who IBM was and what they were trying to achieve. Now... I don't. I think they're some sort of storage company.

      They still sell more big iron than everyone else put together, and there's still a lot of money in that market. How long this will last, it's hard to say; but people have been predicting the death of the mainframe for decades, and it just keeps on not happening.

      • The organizations that still use mainframes are up-time fanatics with business models that suffer when a system is unavailable for a few minutes. As a result, they're so conservative that if they were running the country we'd still be under British rule. As long as mainframes work, they'll keep using them rather than risk changing to a different system.

        Note: I'm an IBM employee, but this is my personal opinion, not IBM's. Technically speaking, corporations don't have opinions, except maybe "more money good,

        • It's not just mainframes... the biggest IBM product we use at wr0k is Netezza (technically not IBM invented, but heck, that's the future of "big databases" right there). Though they should cut their prices in half, or else Greenplum (EMC) will eat their lunch...

        • Except that increasingly, mainframes aren't the only way to get high reliability, or even the most cost-effective way.

          (Disclaimer: I worked for IBM from 1997 to 2011, and now work for Google, which is perhaps the posterchild for high availability on commodity hardware.)

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by qbzzt ( 11136 )

            You're correct from the technical perspective. But my point is that a CTO of a fortune 500 company would rather spend more money than make changes that could impact uptime. "If it ain't broke, and breaking it would cost you your job, don't fix it"

    • Yeah... Ginni was my division boss when I worked at IBM a few years ago. I think I even met her once... she give our department a "major" award with a very "minor" cash bonus attached to it. Under her tenure, half of my department's workload was outsourced to India, China, and Brazil.

      So, yeah... don't expect anything other than more of the same from her leadership.

  • Former IBMer Bob Moffat, who was head of the Systems & Technology Group, was being groomed for the top job. But he got himself involved in an insider trading ring. Not for personal profit, but some careless chit-chat at a dinner party about Sun's finances, which IBM was considering to buy at the time.

    So he got canned, and rightly so. If you are smart enough for the top job, you'd better be smart enough to watch what you say. Ginni will be subject to all sorts of scrutiny by the press in he coming m

    • Was that the reason for increased IBM training programs this year about specifically *not* talking about anything that might lead to insider trading?

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